The Burden of Proof (21 page)

"Claudia, connect me, please, with the general switchboard of the Kindle Municipal Police." As soon as Stern said it, he knew it was probably an error. ThroUghout his professional career, he had been alert for any opportunity to avoid the police. They always made trouble in the end.

He gave the operator who answered the name and precinct he wanted and comforted himself with the thought that the old policeman was probably not there. As the saying went, they never were.

"Ray Radczyk."

"Alejandro Stern, Lieutenant."

"I'll be damned. How are you, Sandy?"

"Continuing." He heard the beep on the line then, over the usual. tumbling of the police station in the background. The old cop sounded positively alight to have heard from him. For the life of him, Stern could still not recall the connection.

He had puzzled on it once or twice, a vagrant thought that came along with many others when he remembered that late afternoon. "Do you still have that file with my name on it, Lieutenant?"

"Hey, come on," said Radczyk, and laughed. "I got a job, just like you.

Never was a file. You know that."

"Of course," said Stern. This Radczyk, he recalled, was not really a bad fellow. Minding his profession, naturally.

"Say, where you at? Sounds like we're talkin over two tin cans. ' '

Stern explained: O'Hare. Stuck.

"Oh, sure," said Radczyk.

"Lieutenant, there is a question with which I would probably never bother you were I not waylaid with a moment on my hands."

"No bother," said the cop. "Shoot."

Stern paused.

"I was wondering if of mind, or the cunning, to manipulate his father about the autopsy. But Peter, to Stern's memory, had been so insistent--he could still recall his voice resounding down the corridors at its wailing pitch as he upbraided that poor bewildered cop, the frantic glint in Peter's eyes. Questions lingered. With Peter, Stern supposed, questions always would."

"Claudia, connect me, please, with the general switchboard of the Kindle Municipal Police." As soon as Stern said it, he knew it was probably an error. ThroUghout his professional career, he had been alert for any opportunity to avoid the police. They always made trouble in the end.

He gave the operator who answered the name and precinct he wanted and comforted himself with the thought that the old policeman was probably not there. As the saying went, they never were.

"Ray Radczyk."

"Alejandro Stern, Lieutenant."

"I'll be damned. How are you, Sandy?"

"Continuing." He heard the beep on the line then, over the usual. tumbling of the police station in the background. The old cop sounded positively alight to have heard from him. For the life of him, Stern could still not recall the connection.

He had puzzled on it once or twice, a vagrant thought that came along with many others when he remembered that late afternoon. "Do you still have that file with my name on it, Lieutenant?"

"Hey, come on," said Radczyk, and laughed. "I got a job, just like you.

Never was a file. You know that."

"Of course," said Stern. This Radczyk, he recalled, was not really a bad fellow. Minding his profession, naturally.

"Say, where you at? Sounds like we're talkin over two tin cans. ' '

Stern explained: O'Hare. Stuck.

"Oh, sure," said Radczyk.

"Lieutenant, there is a question with which I would probably never bother you were I not waylaid with a moment on my hands."

"No bother," said the cop. "Shoot."

Stern paused.

"I was wondering if the coroner reported anything unusual in connection with his examination of my wife?"

"Huh," said Radczyk. Listening to himself, Stern realized how extraordinary this question would sound, arriving out of the blue.

Radczyk took his time. "I know he ruled it suicide, a' course. I was gonna give you a call, then I thought, hellw"

"Certainly," said Stern. Neither of them, for an instant, spoke. Stern waved off a waiter in white coat who approached to offer him a drink. "I realize this is a peculiar inquiry--"

"No problem. Lemme dig up the case report. Just come back from dictation a week or two ago. Gimme a number.

I'll be back to you in two shakes." Stern read the number from the console. What would Radczyk do? Perhaps he would motion for someone else to pick up the other extension; or check to be sure the call-taping system was functioning.

A woman passed by, tall, near fifty, dressed entirely in red--she wore a silk suit with a tight straight skirt and a black-welted bolero hat which matched her outfit; her hosiery was black; a handsome figure. She looked vaguely in Stern's direction, then turned away, but even the instant of contact with her dark eyes somehow reminded him of Margy, and he fell back fully into her grasp, as if he suddenly had passed through the doors of a movie and was flooded over by the light and images of the screen: Margy, as she stood by the light switch, bare-legged and heavybottomed, her blouse undone, the black triangle visible below; her bright fingernails roaming to certain of his parts; the way her mouth lolled open, and her hue, in the profuse light of the morning, increased even across the frail skin of her closed eyes as she traveled along the channels of sensation.

A peculiar sound arose, a beeping: the telephone, he realized.

"Here we are," said Radczyk. "Let's see. Now wha'dya need?"

"It is merely curiosity, Lieutenant. I thought there may have been something unusual the coroner remarked on."

"Not much here. No autopsy. That's what you wanted. I told him there was religious objections. Couldn't figure out anything else."

Stern realized then that Radczyk had called back on a private line. No beeping signal; no tape. Supposedly, at any gate. Stern made no response.

"It's short and sweet, Sandy. Blood test with a C. O. level.

And a copy of the note. And the coroner's ruling. Nothin' in the police reports. I looked at them when they come through."

"I see."

Radczyk took a breath. "Mind if I ask what's up?"

"A minor matter, Lieutenant. It's unimportant."

"Sure," said Radczyk. "What kinda matter?" With tbes questions, he assumed a certain authority. He was, after all, a policeman, and this was, after all, his case. Stern cursed himself and then launched into a concertedly tidy explanation: a medical-laboratory bill had arrived and could not be accounted for. It was, Stern said again, no doubt unimportant.

"I could go over there and check for ya," Radczyk said.

Stern found the idea startling--particularly its appeal In theory, medical records were not to be disclosed without a subpoena. But most hearts knocked at the sight of a policeman's star. Records clerks would tell a cop most anything, if not surrender the paper. Radczyk could learn as much as Nate, perhaps more. But Stern was too much on edge with the policeman, especially his peculiar would-be intimacy. "I could not trouble you, Lieutenant."

"No trouble," said Radczyk, then lowered his voice somewhat. "I still owe ya, you know."

Stern hung on the line.

"Westlab, right?" asked Radczyk. "I'll go over there myself, Sandy.

Keep it between you and me that way. I'll find out what's doin. Gotta get all the loose ends tied up for the case report, right?"

Stern waited. "Certainly," he said.

"Sure," said Radczyk. "Should have something Friday, Monday latest.

I'll call. Good trip back."

Stern cradled the phone gently. There was a sharpness to the objects--ashtrays, lamps--he saw about the lounge. He had the congested feeling he had known all the way back to childhood.

He was certain he had just done something wrong.

The reception area of the U. S. Attorney's Office was shabby. From the looks, one would have thought he was visiting a solo practitioner down on his luck. The shag carpet was reminiscent of an animal afflicted with the mange; the wooden arms of the rectilinear furniture had begun to splinter; and the inhabitants were the usual townsquare gathering. A nut or two sat huddled in the corners, glancing about furtively and writing out lengthy, incomprehensible complaints about various politicians or the FCC's plot to lobotomize them through the airwaves.

Witnesses and prospective defendants, too poor or too untutored to be accompanied by lawyers, .sat with grand jury subpoenas in their hands, awaiting the Assistants who would make use of them. Now and then federal agents, or an occasional defense lawyer, looking hangdog and disappointed, would emerge from the offices. And of course today Mr.

Alejandro Stern, prominent member of the federal criminal bar, sat here as well, surrounded by two ponderous document cases as he awaited Ms.

Klonsky, who the receptionist said was on the phone.

This office had always struck Stern as a happy place. The lawyers were young and inspired, and almost all of them knew they were merely passing through. They did not remain AUSAs for long--five years, six was the average. Enough time to learn to try a jury case, for each to feel she or he had made a sincere effort to improve community wellbeing, before the greener glades of the private sector, of what Stern still thought of as real practice, beckoned. It was a good job, Stern thought. He had lost the best younger lawyer he'd ever had, Jamie Kemp, to the U. S.

Attorney's Office in Manhattan, where Kemp had gone to try cases on his own and work on a rock musical which resurrected certain songs Kemp had composed two decades before when he had briefly been some kind of musical star.

Kemp was quite nearly not the only one to join federal employment.

Before the present United States Attorney, Stan Sennett, had been returned here from San Diego by the Justice Department, Stern had been approached about taking the job. The top aide of the state's senior senator had invited Stern to breakfast at one of the downtown clubs.

This young man, who looked something like the singing star Garfunkel, with a head of shocked whitish hair that stood erect like a dandelion gone to seed, had thrown around every corny platitude known'to man; it was worse than an obituary. This offer was a compliment to Stern's abilities, the young man insisted, and to the wisdom, Stern knew, of a life in which he had never been politically aligned. While Mayr Bolcarro was not allowed by the senator to reward his retainers with federal appointments, his known enemies were rarely elevated.

For Stern, the prospect of being the federal prosecutor was not easily dismissed. This was an advocate's job of sweeping power. For four years Stern could command the nonuniformed armies of the IRS,, the DEA, the FBI, and deploy them as he saw fit. No more of the drag agents' gruesome shenanigans. An end to the heartless prosecutions of widows and firemen for failing to report the income from part-time jobs or CDs.

But, of course, he would have to be a prosecutor. Stern would have to dedicate himself to apprehension, accusation, punishment, that triad of unmentionables that by long-nurtured reflex he despised.

Could Alejandro Stern rise magisterially in court and excite ajury's ugly passions, could he beg them to inflict suffering they would quail to bear themselves? He could not. No. Could not. The imagery unloosed in Stern a real feeling of illness. Oh, he did not hate prosecutors. He had gotten over that early in his career. He admired at times the incandescent zeal of these young people as they attempted to smite evil for the sake of life on the straight and narrow. But that was not his role, not his calling. He was Sandy Sternwa proud apologist for deviation. No perton Argentine by birth, a Jew alive to hear of the Holocaust could march in the jackboots of authority without intense self-doubt; better to keep his voice among the voices, to speak out daily for these frail liberties, so misunderstood, whose existence, far more than any prosecution, marked us all as decent, civilized, as human.

He could not abandon the credo of a lifetime now.

Ms. Klonsky was off the phone. Beyond the single office door, opened electronically by a solemn guardian behind yellow-tinged bulletproof glass, lay a half block of clatter. Telephones pealed; typewriters, still used in this era of word processing, banged. The Assistant United States Attorneys, distinguished young lawyers with law-review backgrounds, were made into ruffians by the atmosphere and stood in the hallways shouting to one another.

Stern came to this office often, generally with a singular mission: to hinder, to thwart, to delay. On occasions--rare occasions, usually at the very start of an investigation he arrived to offer an openhearted portrayal of what he believed to be the truth. But most often the defense was one of avoidance. It was his goal to learn as much as possible while revealing only what the prosecutor already knew, would never care about, or which might trouble or distract her.

There were those prosecutors who believed in candor, who would lay their case out as a bare challenge. But, for most, the appeal of secretiveness was irresistible. Stern could merely float notions, ask questions, lighting from fact to fact, like some pest nibbling at fruit.

"My best wishes to you," said Stern to Ms. Klonsky, as he entered her small office. Robust-looking and dark, she had come to her feet to greet him. To Stern's surprise, she wore a maternity dress, a blue cotton jumper of plain finish which as yet hung loosely. Observed in an abstracted way, Ms. Klonsky was quite attractive--large eyes, a straight nose, prominent cheekbones, the sort of routine good looks one would expect to see in a restaurant hostess.